The Maker Movement: Tangible Goods Emerge From Ones and Zeros

By Chris Anderson April 16, 2013 |

Photo: Jessica Eaton The desire to make things with our hands is deeply rooted. But during the past century, the era of mass production, our tinkering in workshops and garages and kitchens was a solitary hobby rather than a true economic force. That is changing. The world of do-it-yourself has gone digital, and like everything else that goes digital, its been transformed. This is what we now call the maker movement, a term coined by Dale Dougherty of OReilly Media. In 2005 the technology publisher made a bet on it by launching not just Make magazine, a quarterly journal about DIY projects, but also, in 2006, a nationwide series of Maker Faires that became the first showcases for the emerging movement. The exact definition of makers is a bit imprecise, but you can think of them as the web generation creating physical things rather than just pixels on screens. To use the terminology of the MIT Media Lab, theyre treating atoms like bitsusing the powerful tools of the software and information industries to revolutionize the way we make tangible objects. There are three underlying forces at work in this transformation of tinkering. The first is the emergence of digital tools for design and manufacturing. Industrial equipment has been computerized for decades, but now those machines have landed on the desktop. (Similarly, the mainframe existed for decades before the humble but widespread PC changed the world.) Desktop manufacturing tools include the 3-D printer, the laser cutter, the 3-D scanner, and CAD (computer-aided design) software. All these formerly expensive and complex industrial tools are now available in personal size, with prices to match.

The second factor is the digital means of collaboration. As the tools of creation became digital, so did the designs, which are now just files that can be easily shared online. Makers can thereby take advantage of the webs collaborative innovation, tapping into open source practices and all the other social forces that have emerged online over the past two decades. Fueled by crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, makers can even use their network to raise money. The old model of tinkerers toiling alone in their basements is giving way to a global movement of people working together online. The workshops of the world are now connected. The third element is the rise of the factory for hire. Inventing something new isnt enough; youve got to get it to market too, ideally in quantity. This means mass production, and traditionally thats been reserved for people who either own a factory or can afford to commission the services of one. That used to involve months or years of negotiations, taking lots of flights to China, and writing big checks. But today the worlds factories are increasingly accessible on the web, open to orders of any size from anyone, at any scale. Thanks to digital production and design, factories in China are flexible enough to take orders online, by credit card, for batches as small as a few dozen or as large as a few million. Other companies, such as Shapeways and Ponoko, offer digital fabrication as a service, so anyone can effectively rent time on high-end industrial 3-D printers or computer- controlled milling machines. Put all this together and you have a bottom-up transformation of manufacturing that is following the similar democratized trajectories of computing and communications. Its still early daysto continue the PC analogy, desktop manufacturing is about where desktop publishing was in 1984, with the Mac and first consumer laser printersbut the potential is immense. Manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in the world. Since the first industrial revolution, the power to make things at scale has belonged to those who own the means of production, which has meant big factories, big companies, and the mass-market goods they were built for. But the same was true for mass media in the 20th century, and weve seen what the Internet and its long tail of content has done to that. Now imagine a long tail of things: physical goods created with the webs digital innovation model. Thats the maker movement. CHRIS ANDERSON (@chr1sa) is Wireds senior maker and the author, most recently, of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. He was editor in chief of the magazine from 2001 to 2013.